And Good Riddance…

Facebook has banned it, Google is banning flash advertising from its network (actually Chrome is dropping support altogether 1/1/17), most mainstream mobile devices do not support it, and even Adobe has abandoned it for the most part, although they say it will still be a “first class citizen”—it is now “Adobe Animate“.

In 2015 There were 316 bug fixes: that’s about 5/week, or 1 every 33 hours.

As an eLearning professional I lost a lot of sleep over the past year dealing with bugs, customer complaints and issues, and converting legacy material to HTML5.

As much as I dislike it today, I think it is important to note that Flash was a revolutionary technology. Introduced in 1996 it was a revolution to what was more or less static internet.  Heck I grew up on it, playing games on the web during class in middle school.

However, now that it’s gone, it has left a lot of us with quite a mess to clean up.  None of our flash based work is acceptable on the mainstream internet anymore.  Businesses, for the most part, only want material provided to them in HTML5 as they don’t want to deal with its vulnerabilities, and they want their employees to be able to use their iPhones to be able to access it.

Legacy Material and Conversion

Over the next few weeks we will be adding some tips and tricks for converting legacy Flash-based material, and if you are in the eLearning world, a list of some of the top authoring tools and which ones tend to have the best HTLM5 output.

Conversion can be a time-consuming and expensive process. If you find yourself dealing with this and need assistance, or just some advice, please feel free to contact us.